Category: My Family Matters (To Me)

  • Field trip with elevator

    Telluride Daily Planet,  Sunday, October 21, 2012 Circa 1972, my father decides that the three of us (my mom and I — the rest in college) are going on a field trip to visit a wheat farming family in eastern Washington. He has read of an exchange program and wants to go since he has…

  • Drive-in delirium

    Telluride Daily Planet Sunday, September 2, 2012 My father, a ramrod army man, says No to me so many times growing up that at some point each time, I simply stop asking. I stop asking to be a patrol in elementary school, which is something I want so bad I dream the wood handle is…

  • Rock, paper, scissors, hair

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, December 4, 2011 I am standing, scissors in hand, poised and inches away from my sister’s thick hardly-gray-even-though-she’s-ten-years-older tresses, thinking about gene puddles and the great wagon wheel of karma. Joelle and I, though we have identical voice registries and laugh at the same time at the same jokes, look not…

  • Apples (my father’s dream)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Thursday, September 15, 2011 After dad retired from the Army, he got a job at Boeing. I’m not sure exactly what he did there, but he got laid off along with everyone else in Seattle in the early ‘70s, and, to my mother’s great surprise, became a permanent fixture in the house…

  • Lost (and found) in translation

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, October 3, 2010 “I’ll take the 8th Battalion for a week and you keep the house and Michelle for one day and we’ll see who is begging whom first.” —Jeannine Curry My mother used to like to tell a story about an incident at the public library in Carmel circa 1960.…

  • Sugar, Sugar

    Telluride Daily Planet,  Thursday, August 5, 2010 My mother used to tell people — quite emphatically — that she lost her appetite during the war. She said it as if she were an amputee, or someone eviscerated of the mojo that made her desire deliciousness and nourishment. And every time she said it, I was mad…